I am in the same boat as the OP. Loved reading when I was younger, everything from newspapers to novels.
What I find myself doing now with most long-form Web or mobile content, as well as printed magazines and newspapers, is skimming to get the basic facts or quotes and then moving on. I just don't have the time or attention to stay focused anymore.
As for books (fiction and nonfiction), I find myself skimming when I using the Kindle. The Kindle Fire is even worse because of the easy access to other distractions. For printed books I can focus but I have found my threshold for abandoning a book is much lower. I did this recently with a novel by an author I used to love; I just felt the characters in the new novel were wooden and I noticed some basic editing errors. I returned the book to the library after about 40 or 50 pages.
As for the reasons behind this: I am not a programmer so for me the issue is not related to dealing with short lines of code. I think it is a combination of information overload, easy access to screens, and training our minds (through exposure to text messages, tweets, online updates, short video clips, etc.) to prefer condensed communication.
The trend makes me uncomfortable, but on the other hand, I also see it as part of the evolution of media and society. If we look back through history, we can see how other new media had a similar impact. Newspapers, film, and television changed styles of writing and peoples' preferences for reading materials and storytelling. Then, as now, there was great discomfort in the way media and storytelling evolved. A 1961 speech by the then-chairman of the FCC called television a "vast wasteland." If you go further back, there was negative reaction to the introduction of radio, the use of photos in newspapers, and even opera, which was seen by 17th-century British intellectuals as "chromatic torture." There has been a lot of thoughtful expository writing about this; if you are interested (and can manage to read an entire book) I recommend checking out Mitchell Stephens "The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word" (1) and Walter Ong's "Orality and Literacy" (2). They are somewhat dated now, but I think they really documented important transitions from antiquity to the end of the 20th century.
What I find myself doing now with most long-form Web or mobile content, as well as printed magazines and newspapers, is skimming to get the basic facts or quotes and then moving on. I just don't have the time or attention to stay focused anymore.
As for books (fiction and nonfiction), I find myself skimming when I using the Kindle. The Kindle Fire is even worse because of the easy access to other distractions. For printed books I can focus but I have found my threshold for abandoning a book is much lower. I did this recently with a novel by an author I used to love; I just felt the characters in the new novel were wooden and I noticed some basic editing errors. I returned the book to the library after about 40 or 50 pages.
As for the reasons behind this: I am not a programmer so for me the issue is not related to dealing with short lines of code. I think it is a combination of information overload, easy access to screens, and training our minds (through exposure to text messages, tweets, online updates, short video clips, etc.) to prefer condensed communication.
The trend makes me uncomfortable, but on the other hand, I also see it as part of the evolution of media and society. If we look back through history, we can see how other new media had a similar impact. Newspapers, film, and television changed styles of writing and peoples' preferences for reading materials and storytelling. Then, as now, there was great discomfort in the way media and storytelling evolved. A 1961 speech by the then-chairman of the FCC called television a "vast wasteland." If you go further back, there was negative reaction to the introduction of radio, the use of photos in newspapers, and even opera, which was seen by 17th-century British intellectuals as "chromatic torture." There has been a lot of thoughtful expository writing about this; if you are interested (and can manage to read an entire book) I recommend checking out Mitchell Stephens "The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word" (1) and Walter Ong's "Orality and Literacy" (2). They are somewhat dated now, but I think they really documented important transitions from antiquity to the end of the 20th century.
1. https://www.nyu.edu/classes/stephens/rise%20of%20the%20image...
2. http://www.amazon.com/Orality-Literacy-Anniversary-Edition-A...